Talent is not some fungible measure. I know incredibly smart people who can fail at incredibly basic life skills.
"They wouldn't be that dumb" is a meaningless argument. People you don't know can be as smart as anyone on the planet and still make very dumb choices.
Speaking of that "obviously impressive" line, I'm getting really tired of something like that line seemingly needing to be included by anyone doing any criticism of agentic systems. The most common form of it is "these models are obviously useful" midway through a bunch of arguments about environment, data provenance, skill atrophy, or even correctness issues.
It's just really weird. Why does everyone feel the need to equivocate? "I worry about genocide and the environmental impact of radiation from nuclear bombs. Obviously, they are very useful for annihilating entire cities, certainly. But are we really atrophying our ability to invade with infantry?"
I want to tell these people to just cut it out. It's demeaning to their own position.
This may be out of left field but you might be interested in Michael Parenti's essay "left-wing anti communism". It's about this same thing in American politics where everyone from the furthest right to furthest left has to condemn socialism before opening their mouth, and how it's turned the US's elected left into preemptively apologetic losers.
No idea where you stand politically but there's not that many arguments about this type of rhetorical error so hopefully you consider it.
People directly criticize LLM code generators all the time on this site. It's all over the place. You are almost certainly being routinely banned because you write low-effort comments that violate the site guidelines and negatively impact the conversation.
> did anyone else have the feeling that, for all their messaging around “we are so afraid that our models will be used for hacking”, they sure as hell are trying their best to make their models razor focused on precisely that purpose?
That's the point. It's like a pool hall with "NO GAMBLING" signs posted on the walls.
The message is that the hall is intended for gambling, but that the hall's patrons may be held liable if the situation becomes inconvenient for the proprietor.
In this case, the product is intended for hacking, but of course the user may be held liable if the situation becomes inconvenient for the model's proprietor.
> On what planet do people start paying for things without keeping an eye on the costs and no-one notices until you have spent a crazy amount? I don't understand. You are either paying a fixed amount which you are happy about in-advance or you are PAYG in which case you would ballpark how much it costs.
The AI rollout has in large part been about giving management an opportunity to say "fuck you" to engineering.
Engineering payroll needed to be slashed and the C-Suite was happy to let their managers get some lashes in on the uppity workers.
The point of AI is:
1. It's bad engineering and everyone knows it.
2. Management is pushing it through anyway.
3. Deal with it, asshole.
The ROI is besides the point. It's about breaking the spirit of engineering labor with irrational decisions made outside of their control.
Edit: It is just as much about affirming the exalted status of management in comparison to labor. It's a bitter reinscription of the status hierarchy in tech; Management is good and labor is bad; Management is considerate and labor is ignorant; Management is strong and labor is weak; Management is superior and labor is inferior.
> The ROI is besides the point. It's about breaking the spirit of engineering labor with irrational decisions made outside of their control.
it may be where you are at (not disagreeing at all with your experience), but where i am the management really are 'true believers' so to speak... they are all-in and mesmerized by the tech (call it fomo or whatever)
> The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?
The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic.
Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its corresponding cultural manifestations.
> The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic.
No, us vs them is an innate aspect of human psychology going back tens of millions of years. It is found in literally every single group of humans that numbers more than 20.
N = 1. The company I’m working for, (a hundred employees, EU), we basically build projects on data science, ML, optimization, operational research and such for many industries (transportation, manufacturing, finance, engineering, etc). We are basically the first to know about the latest advances in AI and we have internal optional workshops on LLM assisted development. And yet nobody is pressured to use these tools. At most we are incentivized to at least try these tools.
At my job in 2023, after the staff engineers quit, new-hire engineers backed by new-hire managers pushed through a series of 5,000-10,000 line GPT 3.5 PRs affecting ludicrously convoluted, critical Makefiles designed and maintained by engineers who had left the company because of AI initiatives.
Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.
OpenAI is clearly run by dummies and subpar engineering talent.
> The model is obviously impressive
Speak for yourself.